Feed Items
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
Bukele — the recent recipient of (apparently illegal) federal payments in exchange for opening up his torture prison...
The sort of executives who fail upward into positions of prominence at major media and streaming companies are all out of original ideas. So as the Wall Street pressure for impossible, perpetual quarterly growth mounts, they’ve increasingly resorted to the same tactics we’ve long seen at major shitty cable companies like Comcast.
For streaming video that has meant a lot of pointless mergers (and...
This past Friday, August 8th, Patrick Joseph White allegedly opened fire on the CDC campus in Atlanta, killing a police officer while expending nearly 200 shots that sprayed the office buildings. This being America, this news in and of itself is not particularly compelling. We do mass shootings and attempted mass shootings better than anyone else in the world, after all. USA! USA!
But the...
“Hysterical.” “Alarmist.” “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” “He’ll be constrained by institutions.” “There are adults in the room.” “You’re overreacting.” “The generals won’t let him.” “Stop being so dramatic.”
Every single person who said we were being hysterical about Trump being an existential threat should be forced to explain how the President seizing control of the capital’s police force and...
Support us on Patreon »
One of the most troubling things about this era in American history is the number of institutions that have caved to Trump’s bullying and given him what he wants, especially when it comes to media organizations. The folks over at the non-profit Free Press have done a lot of research and put together the new Media Capitulation Index, which aims to track and dissect this...
Amidst the current batch of child safety bills in Congress, a familiar name appears: the STOP CSAM Act. It was previously introduced in 2023, when I wrote about the threat the bill posed to the availability of strong encryption and consequently to digital privacy in the post-Roe v. Wade era. Those problems endure in the 2025 version (which has passed out of committee), as explained by the EFF,...
Become a language expert with the Babbel Language Learning deal. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle one or all in 10-to-15-minute bite-sized lessons, so there’s no need to clear hours of your...
Three weeks ago, California federal court judge Maame E. Frimpong issued an order blocking ICE from pretending looking a bit foreign was reasonably suspicious enough to justify stops, much less the mass arrests ICE officers have been carrying out regularly in the Los Angeles area.
The opinion had to spell out things that should have been immediately clear to ICE (or, indeed, any law enforcement...
With the cowards at CBS/Paramount having paid their $16 million bribe, Trump’s FCC was quick to rubber-stamp its approval to the company’s $8 billion merger with Skydance (owned by Trump’s billionaire friends in the Ellison family). Part of that deal involves installing a Trump babysitter to ensure what’s left of the media giant’s journalism division is appropriately deferential to our mad baby...
Although the Supreme Court has yet to say so itself (and probably won’t any time soon, given its current composition), it’s generally accepted that citizens have the right to film public officials performing their public duties. Law enforcement officers, however, seem to feel this should never be a right and that their actions in full view of the public shouldn’t be memorialized by anything other...